This week the first graders tasted a rice that has been growing and harvested by hand in present-day North America for thousands of years: wild rice, or manoomin, as it is known to the Anishinaabe Indigenous peoples. Together students sprinkled wild rice salad containing roasted butternut squash, dried cranberries, and wild arugula with toasted pumpkin seeds and drizzled a dressing over it made with lemon juice, mustard, and extra-virgin olive oil.
Our non-fiction read aloud for the week, The Sacred Harvest: Ojibway Wild Rice Gathering by Gordon Regguinti with photographs by Dale Kakkak, tells the story of Glen, an 11-year-old boy from the Leech Lake Reservation in Northern Minnesota and follows him as he learns his family’s traditions around harvesting, parching, drying, jigging, winnowing, cooking, and eating wild rice.
In class we watched excerpts from a film, Mnomen (Wild Rice) - The Food That Grows On Water, in which members of the Gun Lake Tribe in Michigan share their people’s profound spiritual relationship with wild rice. My personal favorite was the footage of the special moccasins the Pottawatomi Indians wear to dance on the rice to separate the kernels from the hulls. We learned that wild rice is often the first food the Anishinaabe feed their babies and the last food fed to elders, as well as an integral part of burial ceremonies after death. Some first graders shared their first foods from when they were infants, and we all did a quick jig with our feet as a brain break before we said our goodbyes for the week.
